Little Lamb Lost Read Online Free Page B

where I’d grown up. This nut hadn’t fallen far from the tree.
    My father’s Toyota hybrid was there,
covered in political bumper stickers and telling me he was home. A blast of
cool air greeted me as I opened the door. “Dad?”
    “In here.”
    I walked through the foyer to the living
room. Virtually nothing in the house had changed since I was a kid. An oil
portrait of my late grandfather hung above the fireplace. His Dutch features,
including his square jaw, fair skin, and summer sky blue eyes, had been
bequeathed to my father. And to me. And to my younger brother, Chris.
    On this same green carpet I’d taken my
first steps and held slumber parties in junior high school. In this room lived
the memories of my mother before she died of breast cancer when I was thirteen.
Memories of me and my brother joking and roughhousing. It was a home built on
laughter and love. What all my clients should have had, but didn’t.
    The furniture was still the same, too,
except now the tweed sofa and chair were shoved against a cream-colored wall so
my father could practice Tae Kwon Do. Dad was dressed in his gi , with
a yellow belt tied around his waist. His milk-blond ponytail was longer than
mine and touched with gray. He was flushed from the exercise, making the
crescent-shaped scar on his left cheekbone stand out white on his face. The
story behind the scar was one I’d heard frequently growing up, about how he and
the other Freedom Riders had been beaten and arrested in May of 1961, trying to
get to New Orleans to support the desegregation of the interstate bus system.
He’d been twenty years old and spent two months in jail.
    Dad completed a front snap kick and a
couple of punches. He was in better shape than me.
    “Hi. What’s up?” he asked.
    “One of my clients died today.”
    Dad stood up out of his stance. “Shit.”
    “You’re not kidding. Do you have any
aspirin?”
    “Sure. Hang on.” He walked down the hall
toward the bedrooms. I waited, massaging my temples, until he returned with two
Tylenol.
    “Thanks.” I headed for the kitchen and
swallowed them with a sip of water.
    Dad followed and asked, “What happened?”
    “I don’t know yet. His mother found him
dead this morning on the kitchen floor. She just got him back two months ago.”
    “You think she killed him?”
    “There weren’t any immediate signs of
abuse. They’ll do an autopsy, then we’ll know more.”
    “What’d Mac say?”
    “We spent the whole afternoon going over
everything. All the policies were followed correctly.”
    “So you didn’t do anything wrong?”
    “I don’t think so. I need to watch the
news. They were already camped out at the office when I left.”
    The den was a sunken room three steps
down from the kitchen, paneled in dark wood. A sliding glass door led to a
patio with a view of Oxmoor Valley and the Robert Trent Jones golf course
below. I sank into one of two enormous recliners and reached for the remote.
    “Do you want a drink?” Dad asked as he
walked to the built-in bar in the corner.
    “No, thanks. It’d probably make my
headache worse.”
    He poured himself a shot of Gentleman
Jack over ice and joined me. We watched the last ten minutes of the national
news, the usual stuff about the economy and foreign policy, then I switched to
FOX for the six o’clock newscast.
    We were the second story, right after a
homicide in north Birmingham. My jaw clenched as the pretty anchorwoman began
with, “Police were called to an apartment in Avondale today to investigate the
death of a two-year-old boy. Fox Six has learned that the child may have been
involved with the Department of Human Services. We go to Jeffrey Vale for the
story.”
    The picture changed. In the background
was our office building, the windows reflecting the late afternoon sun. The
camera focused on the impatient young man I had escaped from earlier. In one
hand he held a microphone, in the other his notes. “Thank you, Kathleen. Fox
Six has